Michael Gove praised Hackney for cutting back a third of its social workers:

Hackney has bucked the trend, he said, with a model that “relied on holding social workers and managers to the highest professional standards: up to a third of staff have had to move on.
“I am determined to spread this rigour throughout the children’s social care profession.”
He added: “The London Borough of Hackney has every social – and economic – problem you could think of in modern Britain concentrated in its few square miles.
“It also has some of the best - and most innovative social workers.
“And they have developed an approach towards their practice which explicitly rejects the idea of their families as passive and powerless victims of circumstance or social workers as dispensers of other agencies’ services.”